Command Authority

79

The man in the bomber jacket stood in the trees in the cold rain, watching the drama unfold. Behind him was Am Nordhafen, a darkened street. In front of him was the canal, and in front of that was a footpath. He watched the CIA man get accosted by the two men on the path, and he immediately took them for Stasi goons.

This wasn’t going to be pretty. At first he thought they were just going to beat seven shades of shit out of the Yank, but when the men started looking around, making sure the coast was clear, Bedrock realized they were going to try to waylay him, and possibly shanghai him over the border.

Saving the life of some square-jawed CIA suit wasn’t Bedrock’s mission, so he watched from the trees at first, already thinking about calling this in to Castor, his control officer, after the fact.

He’d spent the evening outside the RAF safe house, staying out of sight, in the hope that the real Marta Scheuring would turn up. He hadn’t bought the story about the dead terrorist leaving her ID outside the restaurant before blowing the place up. He knew the ID didn’t belong to the body, so he assumed Marta was still alive. If this was true, it stood to reason she would at least come by the flat for a look.

But while waiting for Marta, Bedrock saw the American CIA officer who’d been in Zug with the MI6 team there looking into the death of Penright. He assumed the American had come to Berlin for the takedown the evening before, but Bedrock did not have a clue why he’d come alone in the rain to sneak into the building. At the time Bedrock wondered if the man had much of a plan at all, as he seemed to wander around for several minutes before committing to climbing up the fire escape.

Bedrock took the Yank for a bit of a bumbling idiot at first. He just stood by and watched, looking forward to the spectacle of the local coppers arresting an American spook for breaking and entering.

And then Marta came. He’d seen her up the street when she disappeared between two buildings, and he knew she was slipping into a back entrance.

Bedrock wondered if the CIA man and the RAF woman were going to fight it out up in the flat, and then, when they had been inside the building for what seemed bloody ages, he wondered if they just might be making a baby up there.

Finally they came out, through the back entrance that Bedrock had spotted minutes into his recon of the building. He followed them, in the hope that Zenith himself would turn up looking to punch Marta’s ticket.

Bedrock’s mission was to find and kill a Russian who called himself Zenith, and the German terrorist was just, as far as he was concerned, nothing more than bait.

Bedrock knew more about the activities in Zug and the actions of a Russian called Zenith than anyone else, because he had been on this operation for more than a month. He had dutifully reported all his actions to Hugh Castor, who, Bedrock only assumed, would have scrupulously held on to this information and not passed a bloody shred of it to MI6.

He was right about that.

After following the unlikely duo through the rain-swept streets of the former French sector of West Berlin, Bedrock watched the German girl do a runner, and he watched the American promptly lose her. It was at this point he noticed two men skulking about the neighborhood, and he watched the handsome American bloke bumble right into them.

He pegged the men for Stasi operators, which meant to him the opposition had a tunnel nearby, which made perfect sense, since Marta Scheuring had just evaporated into thin air.

Bedrock stood in the trees less than twenty-five yards away, while the CIA man fought against the two Stasi officers. The Englishman was surprised to see the American was a goer, and he took down the first Stasi asset with a somewhat adequate right jab to the snout, so when, with his back turned, the other man pulled out a Walther PA-63, Bedrock deemed the man a poor sport, and he decided to intervene.

He violated his mission parameters and broke cover, racing across the footpath in what he thought to be a million-to-one chance of stopping a kidnapping or a murder.

He took the second German down, but the bloody Yank fell into the canal. Bedrock had just picked himself up off the pavement and scanned the windows of the nearby apartment buildings to make sure no one was watching, when four more men came out of the trees.

The neighborhood had gone rotten with East Germans. These would be Stasi as well, which was bad news for Bedrock.

He turned to dive headfirst into the water, his only means of escape.

“Halt!” came a shout from behind. He knew if these blokes came from the tunnel as well, it was likely they would also be carrying Walther PPKs or PA-63s or some other sidearm, since they did not have to go through any sort of control area.

The crack of a gunshot confirmed this, and it stopped him in his tracks. He turned and saw three men with pistols on him, and a fourth man with his gun high in the air, wisps of smoke floating in the rainy night around its muzzle.

Bedrock knew he would never make it into the canal.

A hood was placed on his head, he heard German spoken as he was pushed up the street, and soon he was shoved through the door of one of the buildings a block away from the Boyenstrasse section of the wall.

He was led down a narrow staircase, and then lowered deeper belowground in some sort of a metal basket.

It took fifteen minutes for them to get a hooded and tied man through a hundred-meter-long tunnel. Bedrock moved on his knees with his hands behind his back, and when his knees were so bloody and raw he could no longer stand it, he rolled on his back and kicked his way on, abrading his elbows and head and backside.

When he and the four men made it to the other side of the wall, he was brought back up to the surface and led into a van. As it drove around, the men with him kicked him for a few minutes, just for fun, before the van stopped abruptly.

Twenty-nine-year-old Victor Oxley, code-named Bedrock, took another boot to the back of his head — it must have been the fifth or sixth, but he’d lost count. This one slammed his face even harder into the metal floor of the van. He felt blood on his lips and running from his nose.

As much as he hurt, he knew this was only the beginning, because he was in the East now, and the opposition could bloody well do with him whatever they bloody well pleased.

The door opened. Bedrock thought he’d reached his destination, but instead someone joined them in the vehicle.

There was a long conversation in German, some arguing, and though Bedrock could not understand the words, he had the impression that it had to do with control of him, the prisoner. It seemed the Germans were getting the upper hand, and for a short moment he thought the men above him might even come to blows, but finally things settled down.

A man leaned right over his face; the Englishman could smell tobacco and sweat. When the man spoke, he spoke in English, but there was no doubt. The man was Russian.

“I do not know who you are, but I think you are one of the people who have been making life very difficult for me and my associates. If I could, I would take you out of here and shoot you right now.” He paused. “When Stasi is finished with you, you might wish I had.”

And that was all.

The van stopped a moment later, the door opened, and someone climbed out without a word. Bedrock heard footsteps retreating on gravel, and he was surprised to hear from the uneven cadence that whoever was walking away was doing so with a pronounced limp.

They were moving again in moments; the English spy thought it was the Russian who had left, because immediately the German men around him all began talking. Ox did not speak German, but he sensed a wave of relief in the voices of the Stasi men.

The relief did not extend to Oxley himself; the boots just rained down harder.

They drove for more than two hours, but Ox knew enough about Stasi tactics to know they could have just been going in circles, a little theater to keep him guessing about where they were taking him.

When they stopped again, Ox was pulled from the van, and his arms were bound at the wrists and held high up behind him in a stress position, forcing him to lean all the way forward at the waist. There were men on both sides of him, and they pushed him onward, upstairs, downstairs, in elevators that disoriented him to the point he did not know if he was in the bottom of a nuclear silo or at the top of a TV tower.

Finally he was brought into a room, his hood was removed, and his cuffs were attached to a hook at a table.

He had not spoken a word so far, and he made a decision, right there, that would simultaneously save his life but condemn it to unbearable hardship.

He decided to speak Russian.

He had no identification on him, he’d left everything in his hotel, so he could say whatever he wanted without any direct proof he was lying.

As long as he kept his cover up.

For three days he was kept awake with cold water and electric shocks in an attempt to break him, but he spoke only Russian, told the Germans he didn’t know what they wanted, and they had no right to do this to a citizen of the Soviet Union.

Ox had heard the stories about how Stasi agents had a particularly nasty way of tracking people they had picked up. The Stasi would sit them down in front of what looked to be some sort of large camera, then tell them to wait while they changed film.

But it was not a camera. It was an X-ray machine, and the entire time the unfortunate subjects sat there they were being bombarded with radioactive particles.

The process would ensure that every time the subjects passed through any of the checkpoints with the West, all of which had radiation detectors, they would be flagged as having been previously picked up by the Stasi.

They might have their lives shortened by decades because of cancer from radiation poisoning, but no matter. The Stasi found the tactic convenient.

But Oxley was not radiated by the Stasi, because Oxley was not heading back out to the West.

No, he was headed east.

The East Germans handed him off to the KGB.